In the early 19th Century, different forms of ‘football’ were evolving in the schools and villages. The old traditional football games, which had been wild, brutal and uncomplicated at village and public school levels, were starting to become codified.

Matches were matters of pride and honour. Unwritten rules would apply to hazards of the sporting area, which would include trees, walls and streams which might present obstructions in an undefined playing area.

At Rugby School the first rules of the game were written down in 1845 were so that visiting teams could understand the local conventions.

William Webb Ellis is claimed to be the ‘inventor’ of rugby football. It is said that Webb Ellis, a student at Rugby School in 1823, ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football took the ball in his arms’ and thus created a new game. The story implies that Webb Ellis was playing a form of football which had rules that prohibited holding the ball. There is some dispute about this, as the game’s ‘rules’ (not yet ‘laws’), were not codified until a Rugby School hand written document appeared in 1845. But this has not prevented Webb Ellis from becoming an icon of rugby union, with the Rugby Union World Cup named after him, and his statue displayed at Rugby School.

Thomas Hughes, a Rugby School student in the 1830s, who wrote ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ claimed that ‘a jury of Rugby boys of that day would almost certainly have found a verdict of 'justifiable homicide' if a boy had been killed in running in for a try after catching the ball’.

This football game was the ancestor of all the most popular ball kicking games that exist now. These have football in their names, like rugby union, rugby league, Australian Rules, American football, perhaps Gaelic football, and certainly ‘football’ (that is ‘soccer’ or ‘association football’).

The traditional rulers of rugby union held on to the amateur status of that game until relatively recently. If you played rugby league, or were paid for playing rugby union, you were banished from playing rugby union for life. Now these rules have been abandoned, I can now reveal that I played rugby league and Australian rules once (in Papua New Guinea, where the writ of the Rugby Union does not run), and on tour in Cornwall with a university club I was invited to play for Falmouth on a day when the university team did not have a game. After the match I found a ten bob note in my shoe (in pre-decimal times, ten bob being 50p in modern currency) and I didn’t have to buy a drink all evening. I may have lost my amateur status. Please don’t tell the Rugby Football Union. I was never paid for playing for Bream.